Judith & the Head of Holofernes, Klimt (a noted slut) In my continued reading of the Celtic myth cycle one thing has stuck me as particularly singular, namely the promiscuity entailed therein, the extramural encounters enjoyed by both genders and the absence of moral judgement and social consequence detailed around those activities. Good times. It's not really a surprise- the equity we have begun to enjoy once more in the West is an echo of the legal and personal freedoms we held two thousand years earlier- but a population so apparently uninvested in the shaming of the hoe is an intriguing one.
Regardless of my marital status, jaundiced eye, cane-waving and general haterating, my sympathies will always lie with good old fashioned honest adult promiscuity. My characters are a terrible bunch of sluts, generally speaking; in my considered opinion it is truthful and often delightful to put it about. Make of that what you will. We are a slutty species; with our embarrassment of secondary sexual characteristics, the persisting, universal emphasis thereon, almost constant sexual potentialities and frankly gobsmacking fertility, our hypersexual nature is an inconvenient truth that will defy all attempts to suppress or scarlet-letter its biological reality. The prudery of monotheistic morality is merely a reflection of its enormous, throbbing scale. So there's no need to beat about the bush in search of why we are so hopelessly and comprehensively dirty. We just are. If you do not feel yourself to be a part of that largesse, if you do not believe that women are just as party to the urge as men, consider yourself the exception that tests the rule and part of our species' seemingly boundless evolutionary expression. But judge it at your peril.
While a contemporary definition of slut is and should be inclusive of male activity, that came about five fucking minutes ago in the grand scheme of things. Historically a slut has been a woman, and there was little we could do as a hopelessly disenfranchised gender to alter the ground beneath that. That women have since is to our credit, because if you believe that men were finished with that designation you'll need to spend the rest of your life explaining that to me. Let's not argue about these few things; that historically, slut is female, that as a term of abuse it draws its power from the interests of those in power, namely men, and that our use of it as women is an artifact of institutions that were imposed on us. We may perpetuate the slut while standing in the smoking ruins of those shitty institutions, but we did not install them.
The concept of negative promiscuity, the slut-as-destructor paradigm has its roots in that much greater evil; an overly-proprietary interest in our fellow human beings. Needing to own and control the female came about, arguably, with the need to control and own the land upon which our newly-agricultural fortunes depended. You cannot take it with you and are therefore obliged to leave it to your heirs. Your heirs, not just anyone who might require it; that would be very wrong indeed. Men were required to keep their wives at home and under visible control in order to have their familial and material legitimacy acknowledged.
Tough gig, given our aforementioned biological imperatives. Enter the Slut, slut-shaming, slut-exclusion, slut-battery, slut-burning and slut-expulsion. Remember those? Until very recently in the west these phenomenons have been frightening prospects for any sentient woman conscious of her position in society and that of her children. They still are for some of us, even where legislated against. And every last one of these fates await women to this day in the rest of the world. Slut, to the majority of living women, can come with a death sentence. Lest we forget.
Regardless of my marital status, jaundiced eye, cane-waving and general haterating, my sympathies will always lie with good old fashioned honest adult promiscuity. My characters are a terrible bunch of sluts, generally speaking; in my considered opinion it is truthful and often delightful to put it about. Make of that what you will. We are a slutty species; with our embarrassment of secondary sexual characteristics, the persisting, universal emphasis thereon, almost constant sexual potentialities and frankly gobsmacking fertility, our hypersexual nature is an inconvenient truth that will defy all attempts to suppress or scarlet-letter its biological reality. The prudery of monotheistic morality is merely a reflection of its enormous, throbbing scale. So there's no need to beat about the bush in search of why we are so hopelessly and comprehensively dirty. We just are. If you do not feel yourself to be a part of that largesse, if you do not believe that women are just as party to the urge as men, consider yourself the exception that tests the rule and part of our species' seemingly boundless evolutionary expression. But judge it at your peril.
While a contemporary definition of slut is and should be inclusive of male activity, that came about five fucking minutes ago in the grand scheme of things. Historically a slut has been a woman, and there was little we could do as a hopelessly disenfranchised gender to alter the ground beneath that. That women have since is to our credit, because if you believe that men were finished with that designation you'll need to spend the rest of your life explaining that to me. Let's not argue about these few things; that historically, slut is female, that as a term of abuse it draws its power from the interests of those in power, namely men, and that our use of it as women is an artifact of institutions that were imposed on us. We may perpetuate the slut while standing in the smoking ruins of those shitty institutions, but we did not install them.
The concept of negative promiscuity, the slut-as-destructor paradigm has its roots in that much greater evil; an overly-proprietary interest in our fellow human beings. Needing to own and control the female came about, arguably, with the need to control and own the land upon which our newly-agricultural fortunes depended. You cannot take it with you and are therefore obliged to leave it to your heirs. Your heirs, not just anyone who might require it; that would be very wrong indeed. Men were required to keep their wives at home and under visible control in order to have their familial and material legitimacy acknowledged.
Tough gig, given our aforementioned biological imperatives. Enter the Slut, slut-shaming, slut-exclusion, slut-battery, slut-burning and slut-expulsion. Remember those? Until very recently in the west these phenomenons have been frightening prospects for any sentient woman conscious of her position in society and that of her children. They still are for some of us, even where legislated against. And every last one of these fates await women to this day in the rest of the world. Slut, to the majority of living women, can come with a death sentence. Lest we forget.
Judith II, Klimt. T H E N E W P O L I T I C S O F S L U T T E R Y: T H E N E O S L U T.
Slut in modern western rhetoric is comparatively frivolous and yet honestly indicative of the progress we have made upon liberal thought's broad ways. Personally, I have a fondness for the word and if I call someone a great big slut, I'm shaking hands with their prowess and pulling-power and wishing them the best. Stripped of its formerly grim societal repercussions, sluttery becomes more about the shooter than the target. What are we doing when we call someone a slut and mean it in the vintage manner? We're talking about our own sexual insecurities, our wish not to be upstaged or superseded or outshone by someone more sexually successful or even just visibly hot. After all, the slut is getting some. We may not be, and that has to be defended somehow.
An it harm none, do as you will. Although I do not subscribe to faith per se, the Wiccan rede isn't a bad place to start purging the dead weight of pointless proscription. Safe, sane, consensual; the BDSM community has it sorted too. In the liberal world we presumably wish to construct, let's concede that another's sexual proclivities aren't, outside of any demonstrable, objective evil, any of our business and just leave it at that. Slut-shaming begins in trash-talk, snowballs into scapegoating and that shit ends in crowds of thugs wielding machetes and more recently, .50 calibre. The distance between calling someone a (insert epithet here) and hauling out the big gauge can still be frighteningly minute.
Shorn of it's biblical and genealogical implications, however, sluttery loses its sack full of doorknobs and just becomes about taste which, as already stated, isn't really our business. What is our business is the ethical conduct of others, because we are all affected by its implications. The neoslut should of course check themselves and stay conscious in and of their activities, and be especially mindful of that place where happy promiscuity dissolves into passive and/or aggressive fuckery; namely, when you cease to be a slut and turn into a jerk. As a society we should definitely concern ourselves with that. Jerks have far too much power.
Let's select a public example wherein the principles at work are easily discerned and have indeed become a focus of the slut shamer and the apologist alike. So many keys have already been pounded to so little avail in pursuit of the truths demonstrated by this incident that I throw caution to the wind and land with a belated splat in the midst of this particular shitstorm in a teacup.
Exhibit A; the case of the Famous Actress who fucked her Married Director after working with his Wife on the movie in which they were all involved. Lets not rehash the did she/didn't they/whatever aspect and assume for the sake of argument that it occurred as is stated above.
Was She even being a slut? Sluttery means more than one, and usually overlapping, so technically, probably, but I wouldn't slap a gold star on that shit. Was He being a slut? Same answer. I suppose so, but I am unmoved by the logistics.
People who slut shame the likes of the She in this case are being pointlessly vicious, intellectually lazy and have the wrong end of the stick anyway. For a start, She wasn't being a slut, she was being a big fucking jerk and so was He. Her vagina didn't wander onto his penis while she was sleeping. The fact that she was not married does not absolve her in the slightest; if we wish people to respect our intimate arrangements, however we arrange them, we have to respect the nature of theirs. The validity of marital status, the contractualization of love and fidelity as though they were tradable commodities are irrelevant; someone who divorces their spouse for breaking its conventions had an obvious and public expectation of fidelity. So did her children; He and She shit on all that and the ethical buck stops there, I'm afraid. There is no get out of jail card, no matter how you cut the deck.
People who excuse this conduct on the grounds of liberality need a swift fucking kick too. It's not okay to do it just because you want to. We are not free to be pricks to one another on a selfish whim. Sloppy narcissism is the greatest enemy of the freedom we are cultivating for ourselves; if we don't get that shit under control it will soon be too late to salvage anything from the structures we have finally thrown off. When someone is a jerk we all have to live with the consequences and they blow up in all our faces every day, sometimes literally, unfortunately. There is no sisterhood in special-pleading on behalf of bitchery. There is sisterhood in correctly identifying and challenging shitty behaviour in others, for the benefit of all involved. If only someone had said to the Actress 'Think with your head, girlfriend." Let's just get our facts straight, our aim right and our hearts and heads clear.
I agree that both liable parties in the above scenario deserve censure for their reprehensible conduct. Not for being sluts, but for being arseholes. Responsible, consensual promiscuity is not the enemy and the neoslut should be left to get on without poisoned, anachronistic harping on a code that none of us adhere to anyway. Slut-shamers need to get real with themselves about the origins of their anger and the direction of their aim; laissez-faire apologists are devaluing the self-determination they invoke with their attempts to shield their favourites behind some imagined feminist aegis. They need to learn the difference between ethics and morals and accept the value of the former even in the cold shade of the latter. The neoslut should keep it all above board and head into the clinic regularly. All that requires effort; the kind of effort entailed in accepting personal responsibility as the partner of personal entitlement. Our freedoms have been so hard won; let's not fuck them up.
Céili O'Keefe
(Images: commons)
Slut in modern western rhetoric is comparatively frivolous and yet honestly indicative of the progress we have made upon liberal thought's broad ways. Personally, I have a fondness for the word and if I call someone a great big slut, I'm shaking hands with their prowess and pulling-power and wishing them the best. Stripped of its formerly grim societal repercussions, sluttery becomes more about the shooter than the target. What are we doing when we call someone a slut and mean it in the vintage manner? We're talking about our own sexual insecurities, our wish not to be upstaged or superseded or outshone by someone more sexually successful or even just visibly hot. After all, the slut is getting some. We may not be, and that has to be defended somehow.
An it harm none, do as you will. Although I do not subscribe to faith per se, the Wiccan rede isn't a bad place to start purging the dead weight of pointless proscription. Safe, sane, consensual; the BDSM community has it sorted too. In the liberal world we presumably wish to construct, let's concede that another's sexual proclivities aren't, outside of any demonstrable, objective evil, any of our business and just leave it at that. Slut-shaming begins in trash-talk, snowballs into scapegoating and that shit ends in crowds of thugs wielding machetes and more recently, .50 calibre. The distance between calling someone a (insert epithet here) and hauling out the big gauge can still be frighteningly minute.
Shorn of it's biblical and genealogical implications, however, sluttery loses its sack full of doorknobs and just becomes about taste which, as already stated, isn't really our business. What is our business is the ethical conduct of others, because we are all affected by its implications. The neoslut should of course check themselves and stay conscious in and of their activities, and be especially mindful of that place where happy promiscuity dissolves into passive and/or aggressive fuckery; namely, when you cease to be a slut and turn into a jerk. As a society we should definitely concern ourselves with that. Jerks have far too much power.
Let's select a public example wherein the principles at work are easily discerned and have indeed become a focus of the slut shamer and the apologist alike. So many keys have already been pounded to so little avail in pursuit of the truths demonstrated by this incident that I throw caution to the wind and land with a belated splat in the midst of this particular shitstorm in a teacup.
Exhibit A; the case of the Famous Actress who fucked her Married Director after working with his Wife on the movie in which they were all involved. Lets not rehash the did she/didn't they/whatever aspect and assume for the sake of argument that it occurred as is stated above.
Was She even being a slut? Sluttery means more than one, and usually overlapping, so technically, probably, but I wouldn't slap a gold star on that shit. Was He being a slut? Same answer. I suppose so, but I am unmoved by the logistics.
People who slut shame the likes of the She in this case are being pointlessly vicious, intellectually lazy and have the wrong end of the stick anyway. For a start, She wasn't being a slut, she was being a big fucking jerk and so was He. Her vagina didn't wander onto his penis while she was sleeping. The fact that she was not married does not absolve her in the slightest; if we wish people to respect our intimate arrangements, however we arrange them, we have to respect the nature of theirs. The validity of marital status, the contractualization of love and fidelity as though they were tradable commodities are irrelevant; someone who divorces their spouse for breaking its conventions had an obvious and public expectation of fidelity. So did her children; He and She shit on all that and the ethical buck stops there, I'm afraid. There is no get out of jail card, no matter how you cut the deck.
People who excuse this conduct on the grounds of liberality need a swift fucking kick too. It's not okay to do it just because you want to. We are not free to be pricks to one another on a selfish whim. Sloppy narcissism is the greatest enemy of the freedom we are cultivating for ourselves; if we don't get that shit under control it will soon be too late to salvage anything from the structures we have finally thrown off. When someone is a jerk we all have to live with the consequences and they blow up in all our faces every day, sometimes literally, unfortunately. There is no sisterhood in special-pleading on behalf of bitchery. There is sisterhood in correctly identifying and challenging shitty behaviour in others, for the benefit of all involved. If only someone had said to the Actress 'Think with your head, girlfriend." Let's just get our facts straight, our aim right and our hearts and heads clear.
I agree that both liable parties in the above scenario deserve censure for their reprehensible conduct. Not for being sluts, but for being arseholes. Responsible, consensual promiscuity is not the enemy and the neoslut should be left to get on without poisoned, anachronistic harping on a code that none of us adhere to anyway. Slut-shamers need to get real with themselves about the origins of their anger and the direction of their aim; laissez-faire apologists are devaluing the self-determination they invoke with their attempts to shield their favourites behind some imagined feminist aegis. They need to learn the difference between ethics and morals and accept the value of the former even in the cold shade of the latter. The neoslut should keep it all above board and head into the clinic regularly. All that requires effort; the kind of effort entailed in accepting personal responsibility as the partner of personal entitlement. Our freedoms have been so hard won; let's not fuck them up.
Céili O'Keefe
(Images: commons)
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